Alabama native composes music for Montgomery Symphony Orchestra

Classical music is still being composed today, and that includes pieces that touch the heart of Alabama.

“I think it’s important for any orchestra these days to commission new works,” said Jamie Reeves, MSO’s music director and conductor.

That’s exactly what MSO has done.

On Oct. 28, at 7 p.m. the Montgomery Symphony Orchestra will open a classical concert at Troy University’s Davis Theatre for the Performing Arts, 251 Montgomery St., with the world premiere of a new composition it commissioned, “Wallpaper Ascot” by Decatur native J.R. Speake.

“It’s loud. It’s exciting, especially in the beginning,” Speake said of his work, which is 13-and-a-half minutes long, in four sections. “It sort of primes the audience for the concert.”

Reeves said Speake is a “well-practiced composer,” and that his new piece is very approachable and easy to listen to.

“It opens with a fanfare, something that you would expect at the beginning of a concert. An overture, or something like that,” Reeves said. “It’s very fast and upbeat. He incorporates popular music styles.”

The piece draws influence from popular music, jazz, and “really old” music like Johann Sebastian Bach, romantic music, baroque and classical music, Speake said.

“It’s sort of a collection of my musical interests put into one piece,” said Speake, 30, who has been writing music since he was 13.

“This is the largest opportunity that I’ve had in my career, in terms of the amount of people playing my music at one time,” Speak said. “It’s really exciting to me. This will probably be the largest audience that I’ve had.”

It’s also the beginning of a new initiative for MSO called the Alabama Composers Project.

“Hopefully for the foreseeable future, we’re going to commission a new work every season that’s either by a composer who is from Alabama, or if their work is influenced by Alabama history and culture,” Reeves said.

The rest of the Oct. 28 program features:

• American composer Lowell Liebermann’s “Flute Concerto,” with world-renowned soloist Stephen Clarke on flute.
• Claude Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn”.
• Igor Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite” (1919)

Tickets for this Masterworks concert range from $10-$42, and are available at montgomerysymphony.org .

While the music starts at 7 p.m., come early. At 6 p.m., MSO will have a pre-concert chat about the music. Admission to that is included with the concert ticket. Speake will be there to discuss his composition.

“I hope that it gives the community something that it can be very proud of, and something that we can call our own,” Reeves said. “I also hope that orchestras around the world play these pieces.”

Reeves also wants MSO audiences to feel an ownership these pieces composed by Speake and other Alabama composers.

“It’s really important to our community to feel like new works are being commissioned that are closely related to them,” Reeves said. “We think of classical music as being by composers who lived 200 years ago and have been long dead. We’re viewing music as something that happened in the past. By commissioning new works, and with those works being by people who are from Alabama, people that we relate to, it gives us a stronger connection to our artform of symphonic music.”

More about J.R. Speake

Though he began writing music as a teenager, Speake was self-taught while growing up in Decatur, until he began his composition degrees at the University of Alabama.

“The first seven years of writing was just trial and error,” Speake said. “Me figuring things out. Lots of error. But it was a great time for exploration. What I sort of miss about when I was young and starting out is that everything was new to me at that time. It was just really exciting to get started.”

While attending UA, he marched in the Million Dollar Band for two years, 2015-16 and 2016-17 (second year as section leader in the trumpet section), and earned his bachelor and master's degrees. College in Tuscaloosa is where Speake met two very important people in his life. One was his future bride, a Tennessee native who was also in band. That’s also where he met the future MSO conductor. In his last year there, Speake was Reeves’ assistant conductor, and Speake took conducting lessons with Reeves. Speake was associate director of the Contemporary Ensemble as well as the assistant conductor of both the Huxford Symphony Orchestra and the Opera Theatre’s production of Tobias Picker’s "Thérèse Raquin."

“After my master's, I moved out to Texas with my then-fianceé, and we got married,” Speake said. “Now, we are stationed in Lawrence, Kansas, about an hour outside of Kansas City.”

Speake's works have earned national and international recognition:

• Second prize in the 2021 Quadre International Composition Competition his piece for horn quartet, "Evening Sun."
• Special mention for his tuba concerto, "Camden," in 2022 for the first edition of the Winds Composition Contest Saxony.
• Finalist in 2023 for the American Prize in Music for his choral work, "It Was A Sunday."

Before Montgomery, Speake's works have been performed regionally, nationally, and internationally:

• In France at the 2017 Zodiac Music Academy & Festival
• In Edinburgh, Scotland at the 2018 Fringe Festival
• At the 2019 International Tuba Euphonium Conference in Iowa City, Iowa.

Speake said he enjoys getting to work with his friend Reeves for the MSO commission.

“It’s nice, because there’s a certain amount of trust there,” Speake said. “Being familiar with each other, it’s been a very easy and rewarding experience working with him.”

As a composer, Speake hears much of the music in his head long before any musician plays the first note. Then he has to figure out how to translate that into something a musician can read. He usually tries to come up with the piece’s structure first, and leaves himself open to any unplanned surprises. Often the music leads him down its own path.

“The writing process is an interesting one. It’s sort of a mischievous beast,” Speake said. “It’s hard to officially nail down what it’s like working on a piece, because I think each one has its own character, its own personality, which means it has its own personal quirks that you have to figure out and work through, which presents its own challenges.”

Sometimes it flows freely to the paper. Sometimes the next part just doesn’t come.

“It’s a lot of green light, red light,” Speake said. “It’s just part of the process.”

No one’s heard ‘Wallpaper Ascot’ before

What’s the challenge with performing a new world-premiere piece? The fact that no one else has ever performed it. There are no recordings to listen to. There are no outside artists who have done it before.

Even Speake has never heard an orchestra perform “Wallpaper Ascot” before, outside of the music that plays through his own head.

“In this case, we’re the only people who know it,” Reeves said. “We have to spend a lot of time with it.”

Reeves is looking forward to working with Speake, when he visits MSO to hear the piece for the first time.

“It’s a challenge, but it’s a really exciting challenge,” Reeves said. “This is kind of the way it always was with classical music. In the 19th century when Beethoven was composing symphonies, this is exactly how it was. You played the piece for the first time, and worked through it, and maybe you made some adjustments. We’re getting to have that experience ourselves.”

Keep up with Speake online at jrspeake.com .

Montgomery Advertiser reporter Shannon Heupel covers things to do in the River Region. Contact him at sheupel@gannett.com

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Alabama native composes music for Montgomery Symphony Orchestra